Take Up Thy Bed

In Manhattan's vast, grey Bellevue Hospital, doctors last week demonstrated the work of a new model institute, the first of its kind, for rehabilitation of the civilian disabled. A joint venture of the hospital and New York University's College of Medicine (which are raising $2,500,000 to give the institute a building of its own), it is directed by Dr. Howard A. Rusk, who ran the A.A.F.'s wartime convalescence program. The institute, Rusk explained, hopes to spur a nation-wide attack on a problem greater than that of disabled veterans: disabled civilians. During World War II, seven times as many civilians as G.I.s became amputees.

Jim, a grizzled Negro, was wheeled in on a mobile bed. Paralyzed by a stroke, he had not touched foot out of bed for a year and a half. He lay with both legs stiffly bent.

"Raise your leg, Jim," urged Dr. George Deaver, medical chief of the institute. A thin leg rose unsteadily, fell back. "Do you want to walk, Jim?" Dr. Deaver asked gently. The patient murmured: "I want to get back to work."

"If he can straighten his legs, he can walk," said Dr. Deaver. "One good muscle in his leg is all we need; we can work with that. The average person doesn't use more than 10% of his capacity. There's a great reserve to be tapped."

He faced the patient. "Get up and walk, Jim."

The old man slowly raised himself, eased his green-stockinged feet over the side of the bed until they touched the floor. With a nurse holding each arm, he stiffened up straight, and, with slow, tottering, stiff-knee steps, he walked. The room, jampacked with doctors, politicos, newsmen, broke into applause.

Dr. Deaver turned to a small figure with blue-ribboned braids in a small wheelchair. "Come on, honey," he said. Five-year-old Maureen Eagan (paralyzed by polio since the age of two) gravely slipped out of her chair, toddled shakily across the floor and fell into the doctor's arms. Said Deaver, as she buried a brown head in his shoulder: "She's going to walk as well as anyone."

A slim, dark-haired youth, minus a leg, wheeled himself in, then hopped nimbly up & down steps on crutches. "You probably read about Harold in the papers," said Deaver. "He's the boy who was smashed against a storefront by an automobile last fall, the day after he joined the Marines. When the surgeons amputated, I told them, 'Just give me six inches of stump below the knee; that's all I want.' When he gets his artificial leg, you won't know he has a disability."

One by one, a cross section of the city's crippled hobbled across Dr. Deaver's stage --sweater girls, old men, small boys. Said Dr. Deaver: "We're not interested in how it happened. All we're interested in is, what have we got left to work with? We take the patients in the third phase of medical care, after the surgeons and healers have done all they can for them, and try to bridge the gap from the bed to the job."

A massive Negro woman jumped up, marched up to the doctor. She was a rehabilitated Deaver alumna. She stood erect, held up her now unneeded cane. "Dr. Deaver," she shouted hoarsely, "I want to present you with this stick. Thank you, doctor, thank you."

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